Google is selling Motorola Mobility to Lenovo, giving the Chinese smartphone manufacturer a major presence in the US market. Lenovo will buy Motorola for $2.91 billion in a mixture of cash and stock. Google will retain ownership of the vast majority of Motorola's patents, while 2,000 patents and a license on the remaining patents will go to Lenovo. Lenovo will pay Google $660 million in cash, $750 million in stock, with the remaining $1.5 billion paid out over the next three years.

It may be a model specific thing too. My wife's Lenovo IdeaPad is going strong over three years in with no issues, and it was a budget machine.

I definitely agree though, that there has been a trend towards flimsiness with newer hardware. I have an old Dell CPx laptop that is rock-solid; only the hard drive has failed after nearly 14 years of continuous service (my boss used it for the first 11 years of its life, and gave it to me a few years ago to play around with). Even the original battery still holds a two hour charge.

In contrast, I had a Compaq laptop from 2006 that I had to repair constantly, and I babied it. I ended up replacing the original RAM when it went bad, the hard drive, the battery twice, and finally the motherboard itself. When it died again I gave up on it and parted out what I could salvage.